Happy November, it’s CSS Reboot day. With over 300 participants, there’s a whole lot of fresh pixel goodness to look through. (Some of the sites seem a bit slow, likely due to the traffic.)

As with any project of this sort, people of all different backgrounds and skill levels have contributed. There are a few token efforts, and some feel strangely inspired by others, but overall the bar has been set rather high for this round.

I liked the last version, and I love the new look. Although you can put me down as undecided whether the fixed frame works or not, it’s good to experiment and a personal site like this is the ideal place for it.

“Personal Development” also caught its way into my own notes of Reboots worth to mention, which I will post in the next few days.

It’s a really good example of how to use semantical markup to achieve accessibility, demonstrating, in the meantime, that accessibility doesn’t have to be incompatible with good-looks.

On the same notes, I also scribbled some examples of “heavy inspiration”, but that will most likely not make it to the final post (just for information, Simplebits seems to be very inspiring overall ;) )

I like the idea about a cssreboot, but i got to big. I don’t like the way the pages get voted on(many good sites have a average of 1.9, while less good sites is on the top10). And nighter do I like that there is so many pages. I wished for a system where the users gave eachother response, and votes based on the response. That is my opinion. I’m not happy with my own page, but that is more my problem.

I specifically remember clicking on the URL on that page, and I came straight here from clicking it. I thought, this will be interesting, Dave Shea is participating in the Reboot (how fun). Looks like now though, the webmaster has edited the URL to point to his/her own site.

I think someone was just shankin’ the status of your name just to get some extra traffic.

While that Personal Development site wears its Accessibility banner front-and-centre, it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny.

Apart from the fact that the text about accessibility (apparently “taking into consideration all of the common, as well as most of the uncommon, best practices”) is far too small and poorly leaded to read comfortably, increasing the font-size to make it easier to see causes the white text to spill onto the white background, rendering it invisible.

Unfortunately, each of these sites suffers either from bad contrast, heavy load time, or poor usability (or includes all these issues). Don’t get me wrong - especially the authors -, all sites definitely look nice (great work, actually), but these issues need to be mentioned and, ideally, to be addressed.

I’m glad I’m not alone. I agree with Matthew http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/11/01/css_reboot/#c024185 entirely. I sampled 3 of your suggestions and my immediate impression was that they looked like splash screens (a homepage with very little information on it which I thought had been denounced as ‘web evil’ years ago) which was exacerbated by the fact that there was so much wasted space in prime screen estate.
We need to remind designers that it is IT, that is Information Technology. Web sites should be about disseminating information effectively not looking nice or pretty. By all means make the screen pleasing to look at but not at the expense of the message (unless your message is ‘I’m pretty vacant’, of course).

Ribic is definitely the best entry so far. None of the other designs seem very interesting to me. One thing I noticed is a lot of them followed the same layout scheme. Banner, navigation, content, footer. And a lot of them seem to have two or three boxes beneath the navigation, as seen in Personal Development.

anyway, I think the entries were better in the original CSS Reboot back in May. There doesn’t seem to be enough motivation this time around. In fact, I didn’t even know about this new reboot until about a month ago. If I had seen it earlier I would have entered too.

Right, now I remember why I don’t bother browsing the comments on stylegala.com anymore.

Big thanks to those who understand the difference between constructive criticism, and just simply mouthing off with an opinion.

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